How to Create a Simple Budget in Excel

Video Transcript

"Hi, my name is Dave Andrews. Today I'm going to show you how to create a simple budget in Excel. Let's open up Excel by clicking on the "Start" button, let's go to "All Programs", locate Microsoft Office, let's open up Excel. Now in our budget let's create two columns here. The first one is going to be oh let's say item name and let's say B is going to be the budgeted amount and let's say C will be the amount spent. Now over here let's drag D over a little bit and let's say, oh let's say difference. Great. So in our item name, let's say mortgage, let's say food, gas, oh let's just go with that for now. Now for our mortgage let's say our budgeted amount will be 1500 dollars a month. For food, let's say 600 dollars and for gas let's say 700 dollars, just making this up as I go along. Now let's say this month we've actually spent our mortgage amount because we know how much that's going to be. For food, let's say we spent about 557 and for gas, let's say we took a trip this month, we spent 850. Now in the difference, we're going to create a formula that will calculate these two. To do so, let's click in the first area of difference, type the equals sign to begin your formula. Let's say the budget amount by clicking on it and then type a minus sign and click on amount spent. So it will be B2 minus C2. Say "Enter". The difference in that case is 0. Let's copy this and paste it. As you can see, Excel is telling us what we've gone over in our budget and what we have remaining. Its that easy to create a simple budget. My name is Dave Andrews and I've just showed you how to create a simple budget in Excel."